Ground Zero for the Complete Collapse of the US Church

TRANSCRIPT
 

I'm Michael Voris, coming to you from our autumn Retreat at Sea, traveling up the coast of New England and stopping along significant places in the history of the Catholic Church.

Today we are in Boston, ground zero for the unearthing of the homosexual-clergy child sex abuse scandal that has and continues to devastate the Church in the country (and really throughout large portions of the Church).

More on that evil a little later.

The history of the Church in the United States has been one overall of extraordinary compromise by the U.S. hierarchy with the prevailing decay of morality. And nowhere might that be more evident than right here in Boston, going back to the 1960s, as the sexual revolution was getting a full head of steam.

The cardinal at the time, Richard Cushing, was extremely powerful, so much so that politicians feared him. One bad word from him and their careers would be over in the state.

In the 1940s, as the nascent birth control movement was still finding its footing, some state lawmakers introduced a bill here to legalize it. Cushing came out strongly against it, and it went down to a thunderous defeat as 57% of voters rejected the measure.

Fast forward 20 years and Massachusetts was the sole remaining state where birth control was still illegal. Again, the measure came up, and this time, Cushing folded like a cheap suit. Why? Because of the influence of a Jesuit priest who was in his ear — John Courtney Murray.

Murray, whether he intended it or not, was one of the leading influences kicking off the collapse of the Church here in the United States. If you think of Rasputin in the ear of Czar Nicholas, you wouldn't be far off.

Murray had convinced Cushing that contraception was a matter of "private" morality and should not be legislated about. So heavy was Cushing's influence that state lawmakers convened a panel and asked for the cardinal's testimony. While he himself did not show up to present his remarks, they were read into the record for him by his attorney.

But what almost no one at the time knew is that Murray had ghostwritten them for Cushing. The key line lawmakers were looking for was Catholics could not "forbid in civil law a practice that can be considered a matter of private morality."

It was all the lawmakers, anxious to dump the state's ban on contraception, needed to hear. The law was shot down, and the Catholic bastion of Massachusetts gave way to sexual revolution with the blessing of one of the most powerful cardinals in the Church.

Could he have stopped it? Well, according to former presidential candidate and governor of the state Michael Dukakis, yes. He is on record as saying, "The cardinal was the most powerful man around. What he would have said was going to go. If he wanted to kill that bill, he could have."

Murray is one of the most influential men in the collapse of the Church in America you've probably never heard of. The worldview, political view and scheming of men like Murray (and, important here, their embrace by leading churchmen) not only gave way to the collapse of the Church, but subsequent fall of the culture.

So while the homosexual-clergy child sex abuse scandal was widespread in the U.S. church, it was first unearthed by secular journalists here from the Boston Globe in 2002. Cardinal Bernard Law and the entire Church establishment in Boston rallied around the cover-up of what had been known for many years.

They lied left and right, enlisted the help of the Knights of Columbus as well as powerful wealthy local Catholics who didn't give a damn about the child victims and were solely concerned with their own image and protecting "the institution."

The chancery, including Law, had known for years that these priest-predators were a threat and just moved them around from parish to parish where even more children, the vast majority of them physically mature teenage boys, were raped wholesale, all while the entire establishment looked the other way, and some of whom actually covered up.

Is there a link between Cushing's caving in on contraception and Law's lies and deceit on child sex abuse by his gay clergy?

Of course there is.

When Church leaders give way to one evil, it is spiritually naive to think that they won't give way to another. Evil leads to more evil unless it is arrested.

Massachusetts was originally a very hostile Puritan environment for Catholics in the colonial days, with laws on the books forbidding the practice of the Faith. Then, as the waves of mostly Irish immigrants swelled the number of Catholics, the situation completely reversed to the point of a single cardinal-archbishop could control what laws were passed statewide regarding morality.

It's almost incomprehensible that given that powerful hard-fought-for status, that a a couple of men could simply wipe it out in one generation. They played on the naivete of the laity and destroyed them in the process.